Wednesday, May 30, 2012

A fire was roaring in Gila National
Forest. We saw evidence here, over seven hundred miles to its north. Smoky haze
filled the air, which was more than enough to drive canyon residents away from
their coffee and papers, down to the corner store on highway 72 (which runs the
gamut from Coca-Cola to fishing licenses, paper plates to instant rice -- with
a post office and veterinary clinic to boot). It’s the headquarters of all
happenings: accidents, road conditions, lost dogs, power outages, pay phone.
And the place for reassurance that our homes would not shortly be up in flames.

The smell was faint, but it was there -- as if my
friend at the top of the ridge was grilling breakfast. I wouldn’t put that past
him, but it turns out it was just thousands of acres of New Mexico charring to
a crisp. Fired up winds sucked up the continental divide with all the power
that my old vacuum has lost; and the front range was hazy, like the Norlin Quad
on the 20th of April.

Now, Jay always says to let the weather tell you what
to do, to tell you where to go. Play the hand you’re dealt, he says --
not what you’d like to have been. When you’re given a full house, don’t pine
for four of a kind. He seldom makes plans of where to fish more than a day
ahead of time and sometimes changes the morning of. Although, I should be clear
that this is not ficklery of a fair-weathered soul; rather, it’s the simple
fact that on a moody, overcast spring day, the midges will be popping off the
Big Thompson, and the bass fishing will be, well, not so good. Sometimes, we go
purposefully towards the bad weather. But sometimes not.

Let's go!

A few days after the fire started, the weather turned
– a forecast falling from the upper 70s to 60s, and 80s to 70 in the flatlands.
Although less smokey, the fire and the wind continued -- in the end, bringing
danced for rainclouds. However, my parents were visiting (Jay’s sister Eva was,
too), and we had promised them some warmwater fishing, a little bit of the
Midwest, a little bit of home here on the high prairie. My sister Erica had
even given up a day of crimpy highcountry boulders for it. And so we packed and
loaded up three fly rods, two spinning rods, a bag of snacks, and a Banjo.

And we went with the plan.

As we walked to the pond, the wind blew harder, and
my hat off. “Aw, it’s always worse on a ridge,” Erica encouraged --
trying to stay positive, trying to be more like mom...a never ending storehouse
of optimism. We all hoped that when we got to lower ground we’d be sheltered a
bit. But my hope is always tempered with just a pinch of doubt. The good
sort though, the sort that keeps you fully awake.

And watchful.

The water was cool, numbing to wade – about as useful
to our cause as a fart in a mitten – and still, the wind blew. Hard. But
we all leaned into it and kept on. After all, that’s what Blocks do, I’ve
always been told, we keep on. And I’ve also always been told that hard
work will, in the end, be rewarded...it will pay off. I’ve always
believed the former is true, the latter remains, however, experientially only
an ideal. My dad always told me that there are never excuses for quitting,
going back on your word, or stopping when the going gets hard. You put your
head down, dig in your heels, clench your teeth, and you pull. You do your best
because you never know when it will be required. Life has a way of testing us,
I’ve found.

My mom Sue, with a Green Sunfish.

And the weather has a way of proving itself right. No
bass for you, the pond snickered, hour after hour. We all heard it -- above
a few carp caught, and my mom’s giggles over the self-indulgent bluegill and
green sunfish nabbing out from rocks for her fly. Yet we stayed -- because of
stubbornness, and because of curiosity – which, I believe, you’d find to be the
largest part of a fisherman’s brain if you were to diagram in bright colors
according to thought patterns.

And then suddenly, nearing the end of the day,
nearing the time when you put on the fleece you packed for the just in case of
Colorado weather, and nearing the time when your stomach starts to rumble you
home -- the wind stopped, dead in its tracks from tiring us out. Hatching bugs
and feeding fish began pimpling the surface, as if it had in an instant entered
adolescence.

And as rods bent, faces turned upwards with grins and
hollers and whoops.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Among fishermen, thank yous
most often come in the form of new water – the sort that is given code
words and whispered about in back rooms. Maybe a cup of flies from time
to time, too. A reciprocal nod of the head. A treat when we’re about to
bonk, and the sugar rush keeps us going. Keeps us giving, with a little
more faith in humanity. At least, those members who fly fish (the rest
really might be a lost cause, as you’ve always suspected).

Sometimes
we are the thankers; sometimes we are the thanked. And sometimes, we
vicariously receive both – through a dirt path leading through yucca
plains to cattle pastures, watered green by a stream running through.

With
a raccoon in the cattails, and bull snake swimming towards the bank,
and redwinged and yellow-headed blackbirds channeling Kodály in the
reeds. With an osprey’s meal, ready and waiting for him around 3:30 p.m.
As if he’d made reservations. With the smell of black angus grazing northward and the light moving on west.

And with bass – naïve and eager -- in the warm beginnings of their summer.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

The hummingbirds have arrived. Something of a to-do
in the canyon. They're harbingers of spring, coming earlier than the
wildflowers, living on pine sap drippings from woodpecker and sapsucker
holes until they bloom. Later, come June. The broad-tailed scouts flew in yesterday afternoon, buzzing past my
ear like miniature fighter jets on a mission, and so they are. In the basement
I dug out the nectar feeders, filling them with the usual sugar water at a
ratio of 1 to 4. The chains from last year have disappeared (basements and
dryers both have a way with that) and so white parachute cord will have to
work for now.

Only minutes back inside, the scout is back. I’ve
always wondered how they locate the feeders so quickly. Their smell is next to nil, I’m
told, but their sight is focused and farther than ours. I imagine their vision
as a spotting scope, honing in on the plastic red bottomed white tipped flowers
which never empty. They must think it’s magic.

The mountainsides of the canyon are like an
unfinished puzzle right now, late spring. Groves of aspen are beginning to
green outside the cabin windows -- but farther up, the nights are too cold yet,
and the colors change piece by piece. Frame by frame looking like a paint card
sample -- dark greens at the bottom, light greens and nude towards the top. My
great grandmother always had card tables in her living room, set with puzzles
in varying degree of completion. She was always working on them, always
trying to find the right pieces. On visits south to Kansas City, we would all
try to help and find the right pieces too. I hated it. I hated that even when
you did find the right fit, you could still see the lines. The finished picture
wasn’t smooth -- edges were bent and peeled over from trying again and again,
left hand corner pieces were tea stained (from where she kept her cup), and
awkward predetermined lines made things fit into the bigger picture. A piece in
the puzzle, a cog in the wheel. I didn’t like those lines.

I guess I still don’t.

But I do always keep in mind that the finished
picture is seldom ever smooth.

I’m a homebody, and I hope (as I’ve been told is true)
that a bit of the nature of the rod maker goes into the rod, and that it will love its homewaters as much as I do. “I don’t travel or fish to ‘get away,’” John Gierach
once wrote, “because my life at home isn’t something I need to escape from.” I
always want to raise a glass of hard cider -- hear, hear! -- after reading
that... I know exactly what he means, for I escape to home...not away.
Perhaps my small homewater trout aren’t as flashy as big browns on the Blue,
or impressive as over caught rainbows on the South Platte. But they are home. And that counts
for something...or at least it does for me. Homewater counts -- for the secrets
told, and the familiar skin. The places you know to go. They they hold the
stories -- and the histories of season upon season, piled up like autumn leaves
over the winter, keeping you warm and the fire going.

And anyway, I’m not lacking in good homewaters. In
fact, I’m rich -- although I didn’t know it at first. When I bought this cabin,
I wasn’t a fisherman. I had no idea that a south branch of a favored trout
stream ran just to my north. But now, I know -- and that, is where I wanted to
go with my rod -- a small stream of home.

Yet in the past few weeks, the record low snowfall in
the mountains has begun to melt, running off and into our streams. Record high
last year and lasting well into July, this year’s will be done well before
that. But a few days before the planned first day out, it decided to begin in
earnest, and the Denver Water Board let out overflow from Gross Dam. South
Boulder Creek’s CFS shot up, as if a dying person had come alive on a heart
monitor. Beep beep beep. A low snow-pack still creates high waters, and my little dream fell, shot down. And I was
tired of waiting.

“Well, hey...why don’t we go to Brown’s...” Jay
suggested the evening before, “...it would be a noble place to break in your
rod.”

Noble. I
thought. hmmm...maybe...

Brown’s Cabin --
a place existent in as much our fantasies as reality. Dating from the 1870s,
it’s a largely forgotten piece of what remains of a Swedish immigrant’s private
life, now on public land.

This cabin, a reminder that I am new. Others have
called these hills home long, long before. Yet we all chose these high valleys and
harsh canyons for perhaps the same reason: evidence that we were here. And that
we lived. We fought. We lost. And sometimes won. We chopped wood and
made supper. We were hardy, and pound for pound strong. We sipped coffee on a
wood planked porch. We loved it here. And we made love here -- on and to this
land -- we who survive its winters. And whoever lived in that cabin did too. In
midsummer, with faces sweat streaked in dust -- like glue lines and glitter --
after digging potatoes.

Here is their tombstone, and I visit often.
Re-imagining a different epithet every time, like the choose your own adventure
books I read in grade school.

We call it Brown’s Cabin, named for all that it holds
-- wild brown trout. Wild brown trout who have developed an affinity for small
bugs, shirking the stereotype of aggressively large eaters in their odd little
world. No one knows how or when they got there, but that doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that they are there and that they are just down the road.

I look at the stream flows again.

“Maybe Brown’s is trying to tell us something,” Jay
says looking over my shoulder, as if she has the power to start the snow melting.

But you see, perhaps she does. For Brown’s Cabin has
developed a personality. She has, if you will, been given a soul. She was built
from living fibers by a pair of living hands, and somehow, that breath remains.
And yes, I know I hold unrealistic views on inanimate objects, and I impose my
feelings upon them. But I was that little girl whose childhood was filled with
talking animals and trees, dryads and naiads, and the knowledge fairy tales
give us that things (and people) are rarely as they seem. I read of
possibilities, and believed that what you don’t see can, in fact,
happen. Perhaps it was because my sister often talked of wormholes and string theory, and I
wanted to find one and crawl through to another world, preferably with talking
animals. But I was no scientist. Rather, I had been given an imagination, and I used it.

I still do.

And here now, if we use soul as description of one’s
qualities innate to them, one’s character, traits, identity -- Brown’s has one,
no doubt.

And I think my rod has one too. It was built from
living fibers by a pair of living hands...and my breath remains.

For we all want waking, don’t we.

“Yes...”I look back to Jay, “I think we should go to
Brown’s.”

10:00 a.m.

We pack our gear and throw on a few extra layers. The
sun is bright, but not warming -- still shining a flat sort of winter light.
Pasqueflowers are beginning to bloom and Banjo runs ahead on the trail down; he
always stops before he loses sight of us though, waiting for us to catch up.
We’re quiet for the most part, Jay and I, yet when I look over -- he’s smiling,
every time.

Once we reach the pond I rig slowly, with a fly
I’d tied over the winter. That was the pinnacle before, catching a fish on a
fly I’d tied myself. However, I aim to raise the bar today.

“We’ll see how it is on still water...” Jay says,
still smiling.

Yes, we’ll see...(although I have no doubts).I take a deep breath, and cast...

And cast. And it feels familiar, like home.

And I look up to the cabin, out west where clouds have moved in,
crowding the valley like the subdivisions cities try to squeeze in wherever
they can, equally as cold. The sky has run out its space, and so the heavens
have come down dropping the temperature, and I shiver, giving my feet a stomp.
I can’t feel them. I can’t feel my stripping hand either, but it remembers --
thank god, it remembers where to go and what to do.

And soon, I hear a splash and see Jay’s rod bend...he
kneels and Banjo runs over as he always does, asking for a sniff, nuzzling you’ve
done well.

At least one of us won’t go home skunked.

“You know, I don’t think this is going to happen
today...” I sulk.

“Keep on” Jay says. Keep on...

And I do, thinking back to the stonefly -- to that
good sign.

The sky continues to darken with the coming storm,
and the wind stops. So do the trout. Brown’s calms and hunkers down. Yet there
is still a crack in the door, I find -- just in time -- suddenly there is
weight, and the rod bends, giving through and through with life, with the
beating heart at the end of the line.

As we walk out, up from Brown’s, through sparse
snowflakes beginning to fall, Jay looks over, his hands stuffed into his
pockets until he’s hunchbacked, and I shrug. What can you do...the mountains
in May. ..

What can you do indeed.

But then again, the mountains in May is where my rod
has just caught its first trout. And so I smile, letting snowflakes fall on the
tip of my tongue.

6:54 p.m.

I look out the cabin’s window as the snow starts
falling harder. Big, ploofy flakes, looking like a flock of pelicans are
overhead and have just eaten marshmallow fiber for dinner. The aspen grove’s
greenhorn hearts bleed for summer, for days when the snow will stop falling and
they won’t shiver anymore. And come those days will, if ever so slowly.

“I’m thirty-six and I’m still amazed by spring.” Jay
says, looking out the window too.

I nod. Still amazed, that from under four feet of
winter’s base snow, raspberries, peonies, wildflowers, and hummingbirds will and do return. Still amazed
how life can turn on you (for good and ill) when you least expect it, and that
come tomorrow morning, the clouds will have lifted and the snow will have
stopped. Darkness will have passed into light with no eulogy.

And yes, in the end still amazed that there will be
brown trout rising, just down the road.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Faith, Tagore states in a letter my grandmother sent me a few years ago, is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.
The note is penned in her usual felt-tip. Bold.
Sure. Straight lined printing that gives away her days before marriage
and five kids, her days as a school teacher. The cross of my grandmother’s Ts always trestle up to the H, yet her Ys and Gs
are straight tailed. A graphologist could tell you more, I’m sure. All I
can tell you is that they’re the lines which make the letters that form the thoughts a matriarch whose line is of
faith, and of the confidence that light will come, day by day
(even when you don’t believe it will). And even when you can’t believe,
you still, somehow, can have faith, because it’s our tradition, my grandmother says, it’s how we’ve found our way. Those are words from a mind unfoundered, from a steadying hand. And in those, if nothing else, I can believe.

I
have that note from my grandmother still, and every year come spring,
with the American Robin’s frilly clucks and the Mountain Chickadee’s
minimalist quarter tones, I awake to that quote, real-time. I awake to
that steadying hand as I put my bare feet on the wood floor, and walk
on...holding tight.

There’s
a glaze of ice covering my windshield -- like the flaky frosting on
donuts I remember eating at Gerda’s Bakery, sneaking a first bite before
we’d completely left the awning with the old German woman herself
painted on, before we were back out on 52 Street walking home. Canyon nights are
still cold, still wood stove worthy. The windshield, a reminder that
while I might be done with spring, she, is not done with me. She’s only
just starting. Light evening rain turned morning ice -- she winks
over her cold shoulder as she walks in the door. But the light does come, eventually -- and when it does, it warms and melts and grows.

8:59 a.m.

The
morning is still and silent. Lake Estes, glass -- until a black lab
jumps in, doing what he was bred to do, not knowing why. A few men cast
spinning rods from shore, and there are rises.

Frank smiles, making coffee and rubbing his mustache, “You brought the reel seat...right...?”

“Right,”
I say, “I did...” digging around in the pack I had checked and double
checked, even stopping the car a few miles from home just to double
check for it again.

Frank slips the hardware on the spalted crabapple for size....cool...

It
fits, and I look down, remembering steel wooling and applying Formby's
to it nightly, back when snow blanketed the ground in feet, and the
woodpile was still well stocked. Already, I think, already we’ve a history. Already, I have memories attached, indexed, filed away -- for the next cold winter when I need to pull them out and be warmed.

“I already have...” as my stomach feels it. The lightness of butterflies and something about to happen.

Soon.

Out in the garage we begin fitting the reel seat. Measuring. Lining up. Does that look straight to you? -- like a spotting scope, I look through the guides -- because you’re going to be the one fishing it, you know. Oh that’s right....I am. And riddled in, we talk -- about craigslist and no-shows, about the great feeling of getting rid of stuff (that curious chameleon of a word).

“Important
stuff goin’ on over here, guys,” Frank says to Hal and Brian and his
son, having just walked in, “hang on a sec...”

I
stay holding my rod, the glue drying, as they load up the table --
laughing and tying it down -- and after a few minutes they come back in
-- Brian, carrying a rod tube. A Granger, whose wraps he wants to match
on the rod he’s making with Frank. “Those used to
be white...” Brian says, pointing at the wraps, colored with age to
yellow instead of gray. Hal leans over and laughs, “I can’t tell the
difference, anyhow...I’m color blind! Had to completely trust Frank’s
judgment when I was making mine!” I chuckle too, not only because it’s
truly funny, but also because Hal has one of the best laughs in the
world -- genuine, full, infectious.

Rod tube made by Hal Powell.

Generous...As they pull away, Frank admires his newfound space, noting: “I can’t let myself fill that back up with stuff.”
We finish fitting the reel seat, and Frank fits the hardware for the
reel. We weigh it, 3.25 ounces, and I make a tag for the tube sock. “Now...” Frank says, “let’s go cast it.”I secure the reel -- which had been curiously waiting to be found in the glove box of a white Ford Ranger on Valentine’s Day, “Yes, Erin...that’s for you.” --
I smile back, and pull line forward and through the guides. Then I take
it in my hand for the first time -- for the first time, complete, with
no more steps to be done. And like so many other things in life (so many
important things), when it comes to the moment,
it’s a blur. Time doesn’t stop, music doesn’t play, motion doesn’t
slow, and legs don’t curl up cutely like Meg Ryan’s during first kisses.
Life goes on, with or without you, at its own pace and with its own
timing -- often, in spite of you; and often, with you trailing awkwardly behind -- and so you must always, at
all times, keep a watchful eye on it as you would an opponent, Annie Dillard says. Stripping line out in a double haul, taking my time, waiting on the backstroke -- there
-- I let it go, into the wind. And the rod responds, shooting out line
with an accurateness and ease I wasn’t fully expecting. It feels
effortless. Natural. Sure of itself and its limits. I aim for a small stone in the driveway. Yes. I am very, deeply, in love with this thing. “Your turn,” I nod towards Frank.“Kind
of loads itself, doesn’t it.” he smiles, laying a cast. “People argue
you need a fast action rod for wind, but I think it’s just the
opposite...” I nod...I know what he means now. I had just felt it too. And
as I watch Frank cast, I think back on these past few months. I think
on how they’ve in many ways been like that bird before dawn. Waiting,
watching, harmonizing in the dark. Having faith in Frank and sandpaper
and glue; and confidence in my hands. Knowing that the sun will rise,
and line will be strung through the guides I’ve wrapped on, but all the
while not being able to see the horizon. Yet then, suddenly, there’s
light enough to see what’s been in front of me all along.

“Now, don’t be afraid to fish it....and fish it hard.” Frank says, “remember, we’re rodmakers, we can fix it if it breaks!”

I grin. “Oh, I’m planning on fishing this very hard.” And driving back south -- more quickly than perhaps I should -- I’m still grinning. I have a cane rod in the backseat, and I’m taking it home.

4:00 p.m.I
honk. Banjo barks. Jay whistles off the back mountain where he’s
clearing spring fed pools which run through the draw. After he washes
his hands, we walk out to the south meadow -- and standing side by side,
Jay gently takes the rod from my hands. His eyes glisten, beginning
slowly with one false cast -- looking back at me. Oh Erin...he says...wow. And picking the line back up, he double hauls line almost the length of the meadow -- asking everything, it gives. “That’s a fine casting rod....a fine casting rod. I’ve held no better.”Now,
I’d thought about what it would feel like to cast my rod. I’d a notion
of how it would be. But I’ve discovered today that I could never have
imagined what it would feel like watching Frank and Jay cast it. I’ve
learned everything about making it from Frank, and everything about
casting it from Jay. And to watch these two men take my rod in their
hands -- the cane I’d split and flamed, the taper I planed and sanded,
the cork I glued and shaped -- and to watch them smile and nod in
approval....there are no words for that. Or at least, I can’t find them past the lump in my throat...

Yet
as I watch Jay continue to cast, aiming at small pines that will surely
be Christmas trees for someone in a few years, I realize that this rod
already feels like an old friend. Like one I’ve come to know over years
and years. Inside and out. And so this day doesn’t feel as much of a
beginning as I thought it would -- because really, it isn’t -- I’ve
been started now for awhile. And this rod, it’s something I’d count
myself lucky to have been a part of -- even, should I die tomorrow and
never feel it give with the weight of a fish. Each step has been enough
in and of itself. Each step has been one of faith, one of confidence,
one of patience, and sometimes frustration. Yet I'm left with the feeling that I’m the lucky one.

Which is how it should be. Then,
after Jay picks all the pine needles out of the meadow’s pockets, up
and down, down and up, we stand still -- in its middle. Silent.
Both looking down. And a brown stonefly lands on the collar of my
flannel, hatched from the small stream across the road. Jay smiles,
“that’s a good sign...”And I smile back.Still, with a lump in my throat.